The company delimits the perimeter of activities for which the employer pools profits and risks, and for which it is therefore responsible. The unity and continuity of this perimeter were first made visible in accounting, but the standardization of accounts, which began in the second half of the twentieth century, changed all that. Accounting now favours the break-up of the company, the uncoupling of profits and risks. The first form of this fragmentation is spatial. The perimeter of the company, as a place of mutualization, fades away, giving way to a collection of units in competition with each other, with increasing permeability between inside and outside.
The second form of this fragmentation, perhaps even more far-reaching in its consequences, takes place over time. Until now, accounting was intended to inscribe the disposition of goods in a genealogical order, because through the way in which each generation does this, it is society as a whole that plays out its existence and the conditions of its possible recommencement. Accounting thus inscribed the company's activity in time, or more precisely, in a plurality of interlocking timeframes. This function is undermined by the adoption of the principle of independence of accounting periods, when this independence is seen as a reality rather than a fiction. This slicing and dicing of corporate life into units of equal and autonomous duration now leads to the disassociation of short and long timeframes.
